


Reconsidering 'The Reichenbach Fall' in light of 'The Empty Hearse' and Series Three

by Monksandbones



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, Evil Plans, Gen, Meta, Plans, Plot, Plot Twists, Suicide, fake suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 11:15:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1159049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monksandbones/pseuds/Monksandbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 'The Empty Hearse,' we learned that in 'The Reichenbach Fall,' Sherlock and Mycroft were working together on a plan to bring down Moriarty and his criminal network by, effectively, feigning defeat. How does TRF look in light of this new information? Pretty interesting, actually, because even the Holmes brothers couldn't control or plan for everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reconsidering 'The Reichenbach Fall' in light of 'The Empty Hearse' and Series Three

**Author's Note:**

> I kept waiting for this meta, and then I rewatched TRF and it occurred to me that I could write it myself.

In 'The Empty Hearse,' we learn in the recording Sherlock makes for Anderson that he and Mycroft were working together throughout series two to plan the downfall of Moriarty and his network, and that their plan involved allowing Moriarty to believe he had defeated Sherlock. A number of persuasive narrative analyses, as well as the series three DVD commentaries, have confirmed that this was the actual scenario (except that I refuse to believe the part where Sherlock says he has lots of coats. NO. ONLY ONE COAT. ONE TRUE AND FOREVER COAT.). This revelation naturally invites reconsideration of 'The Reichenbach Fall,' and in this meta, I’m going to discuss how I think Mycroft and Sherlock’s plan played out over the course of the episode, and consider its implications for Sherlock’s behavior before and after the fall, particularly towards John.

It’s difficult to say exactly what Sherlock and Mycroft did and didn’t know at the beginning of TRF; I’m open to arguments both ways about whether or not they knew that the computer code didn’t exist. Because their goal was bringing down both Moriarty and his network, I think it’s likely that they knew, or suspected, that Sherlock would have to appear to die. What’s more important, however, is that they can’t have planned the events of the episode in advance. They undoubtedly prepared a number of plans to cover any contingency they could imagine, but ultimately, they were not in control of events. In order to trick Moriarty into believing he had defeated them, Sherlock and Mycroft had little choice but to react to his actions. The deployment of whatever plans they had in place depended on Moriarty initiating his endgame against Sherlock, and on Sherlock recognizing it and figuring out what it involved once it began.

Interpreting Sherlock and Mycroft as not fully in control of events in TRF means that the episode still makes sense logically and emotionally in light of the new information presented in TEH. Sherlock's every move in TRF was not calculated in advance. There was greater structure and intent behind his reactions to Moriarty than we realized before TEH aired, but for most of TRF we were still seeing Sherlock’s genuine reactions in the moment. He didn’t know in advance what Moriarty was planning, and we watched him figure it out in the sequence of events after he solved the kidnapping of the Bruhl children. He recognized that Moriarty’s plan was in motion when Claudette Bruhl screamed when she saw him, and Moriarty’s IOU sign on the building opposite confirmed it. He immediately grasped the fact that Moriarty was planning to destroy his reputation; however, it took him longer to realize that the destruction of his reputation was only part of Moriarty’s plan. The decisive moment when Sherlock realized the full extent of the plan, with its ending in his forced suicide, came as he and John left Kitty Riley’s apartment. In other words, I think that beginning with the kidnapping of the Bruhl children, Sherlock did get genuinely swept up in events, and I think he was genuinely disturbed as the details of Moriarty’s plan unfolded and he began to understand their implications.

The moment outside Kitty Riley’s apartment, however, marks an important turning point in the episode. Sherlock’s plans with Mycroft kicked into gear once Sherlock had grasped Moriarty’s plan. This shift into active planning against Moriarty was accompanied by a sharp transition in Sherlock’s treatment of John. Following his mid-rant realization outside the apartment, Sherlock began to close himself off from John; as he started to plan his fake suicide, he also began to deceive John more deliberately and systematically. Until this point, he concealed his and Mycroft’s long game from John, but did not calculatedly manipulate John’s emotions and understanding of the situation to the extent that he did from then on. In fact, up to this point, Sherlock kept John uncharacteristically well-informed about the events John was witnessing, explaining the snipers, Moriarty’s mind games with Sherlock’s friends and colleagues, and the campaign to destroy Sherlock’s reputation. Tellingly, however, when Sherlock realized that Moriarty’s plan was calculated to end in his death, he cut himself off mid-sentence, and did not reveal his new insight to John. Throughout the balance of the episode, his actions toward John were calculated to distract John’s attention and to push him away. Once John arrived at Bart’s following his confrontation with Mycroft, Sherlock diverted John’s attention to the nonexistent computer code, and the possibility of using it to strip away Moriarty’s fake identity as Richard Brook. When John received the fake phone call about Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock seized the opportunity to deny his affection for her, and to deny needing friends, lies that were, in my reading, precisely calculated to infuriate John and drive him away. Meanwhile, Sherlock was surreptitiously inviting Moriarty to meet him on the roof, and organizing his fake suicide with Molly and Mycroft. I think it can only have been at this point that he and Mycroft, with Molly’s assistance, planned the details of his fall and prepared for his thirteen alternative scenarios once on the roof.

I admit that I’m highly invested in believing in Sherlock’s emotional development in series two, but this interpretation of how Sherlock and Mycroft’s plans unfolded during TRF allows for a reading of the episode in which Sherlock was not coolly and explicitly lying to John and stringing him along emotionally throughout the entire episode – again, he was concealing the existence of his and Mycroft’s long-term plan, but until he realized that Moriarty’s plan was structured to end in his suicide, his reactions to the course of events in the episode were genuine, and he was all the more genuinely disturbed by what was happening as he realized the direction in which events were carrying him.

This brings me to the farewell scene on the roof of St Bart’s where, in contrast to most of the rest of the episode, I do think Sherlock was at least partially faking it, as he was in all his interactions with John after they left Kitty Riley’s apartment. His shock at Moriarty’s suicide seemed real – the only other time we’ve seen him recoil so strongly was earlier in the episode when the first sniper saved his life and was then unexpectedly shot while shaking Sherlock’s hand – but I’m less sure about his emotion in his final conversation with John. Do I think Sherlock was happy about what he was about to do? I don’t, and I think some of his shock at the rapid unravelling of events that brought him there came through in his act. I’m also not fully prepared to discount the possibility that he found it very difficult to go through with his plan. However, I think his main goal in this scene had to be to make his “suicide” convincing. There are various possibilities as to what he might have been trying to accomplish with the lies he told John (and he may have been trying to accomplish several things simultaneously). I doubt he seriously expected John to believe what he was saying, but he may have been trying to make John angry in the same way that he had been using John’s anger to push him away since Kitty Riley’s apartment. In that case, it may have been a misguided attempt to protect John’s feelings (or his own) by denying their friendship. Alternatively, he may have been trying to leave a clue to what was really happening by reopening and reversing his and John’s earlier conversation, in which John refused to believe Moriarty’s mind games. But ultimately, this conversation had to serve to make Sherlock look as unstable as possible. It had to convince John that Sherlock was truly suicidal, and it had to convince anyone else who might have happened to witness it. It succeeded on both counts – anyone who was listening, including John, was left with a range of interpretive possibilities: Sherlock really was a fraud; Sherlock wasn’t a fraud but wanted to make people think he was; Sherlock had for some reason started to believe Moriarty’s lies. None of these possibilities points to mental stability! All of them, therefore, play into the illusion Sherlock was trying to create.

The importance of Sherlock’s suicide looking convincing gets at a point I haven’t seen raised in any of the discussions of I’ve read of TEH, although maybe I’m just not reading the right meta. The revelation that Mycroft and Sherlock predicted the snipers in advance, and were able to disarm them and remove the danger to John, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade, has served to highlight the question of why Sherlock didn’t contact John at all during the two years he was away. If John wasn’t in danger, the fact that Sherlock let John mourn him for two years, reflects badly on Sherlock. If there was no danger to John, what reason would there be for Sherlock to let him suffer so profoundly for so long, except lack of emotional fluency at best, and at worst, simply not caring, or being actively cruel? It’s clear from TEH that Sherlock underestimated the effect his apparent suicide would have on John, but I think there was something else going on.

The possibility I haven’t seen raised, but that I think deserves consideration, particularly in the light of Sherlock’s efforts to make his suicide as convincing as possible, is that keeping John ignorant of Sherlock’s survival served to protect Sherlock. In 'The Great Game,' Moriarty targeted John in his confrontation with Sherlock, and Sherlock's reaction surely left Moriarty in no doubt as to John's importance to Sherlock. Moreover, throughout series two, as Sherlock's public profile rose, so too did the public profile of his association with John. Their friendship was both clear to Moriarty and public knowledge. Moriarty's plan required Sherlock's suicide, and gave Sherlock and Mycroft an unprecedented opportunity (whether anticipated or unanticipated before Moriarty's endgame began) to seize the advantage in fighting Moriarty's network. But that advantage depended on Sherlock's suicide being convincing. Moriarty laid the groundwork by providing the ostensible motive for Sherlock to commit suicide, but Sherlock had to make the act look real, and for the act to look real and keep looking real, John had to be devastated. John’s agony was a crucial element. If John didn't believe Sherlock was dead, or stopped believing and somehow “let the cat out of the bag,” Sherlock would not only have lost a major practical advantage in his action against Moriarty’s network, but he would also have lost the protection his supposed death provided him.

This gets back to my point about Sherlock arguably not being happy about what he had to do.In light of 'His Last Vow,' I suspect that Mycroft's protective, amoral fingerprints were all over the fact that Sherlock continued to leave John in the dark about his survival. After all, we learned in HLV that Sherlock’s loss would break Mycroft’s heart just as much as it broke John’s. Unlike John, Mycroft was in a position to manipulate events in TRF and afterward in whatever way was necessary to ensure Sherlock’s survival. It’s clear from TEH that Sherlock and Mycroft were not in touch during Sherlock’s absence until Mycroft extracted him from Serbia in order to stop the terrorist attack on London. But it’s plausible that Sherlock didn’t contact John on Mycroft’s insistence – that whenever Sherlock weakened in his resolve and considered contacting John, the version of Mycroft whom we now know to inhabit Sherlock’s mind palace emerged to dissuade him.

In the final analysis here, Sherlock at the end of TRF was still married to his work, a great man but not yet a good one, and Mycroft's man through and through. There’s more meta to be written about how that required Sherlock to bottle up all the emotional development he had undergone since he first met John, as we saw him doing once he realized where Moriarty’s (and Mycroft’s) plans were leading. He was trying to detach himself emotionally from John, and actively working to push John away, hours before he jumped off the roof of St Bart’s hospital. Depending how you interpret his last conversation with John, he may have found that very difficult indeed. But in any case, it’s worth pointing out that he had to quite visibly work to shut down his feelings before he betrayed John in order to fight Moriarty and his criminal network.

Finally, if John had to believe Sherlock was dead in order to protect Sherlock, both Sherlock and John were right in their exchange at St Bart's the morning of Sherlock's fall. Alone was what Sherlock was left with, and alone was what was going to protect him in his mission to destroy Moriarty. If his fake physical death was going to be convincing, his social death had to be real - at least where John was concerned. But John was right too. Friends were going to protect Sherlock - John was going to protect him by believing he was dead.


End file.
